Comment by hug
4 years ago
Light perception is logarithmic, not linear, which is why your guess is so far off.
7 'shades' brighter and you're already hitting '100x'.
4 years ago
Light perception is logarithmic, not linear, which is why your guess is so far off.
7 'shades' brighter and you're already hitting '100x'.
As are most human senses! Definitely hearing, vision, and smell; possibly also perception of force and weight, though the evidence is conflicting there.
Weight perception is very weird. The size of the object influences how heavy it feels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Size%E2%80%93weight_illusion
An anecdote for this: I got a heavy carbon steel pan for Christmas that I wished for. I didn’t expect it to be in the big box I got because it seemed to be too lightweight.
Don't forget sound perception, which is one big reason we measure loudness in decibels.
I said "hearing" :-P
It is not actually "logarithmic" per se.
At a given level of adaptation the relation between luminance and perceived lightness is closer to a square root.
But over the course of about 30 minutes there are several different kinds of adaptations (some faster than that) which the eye/brain can make to the current light level, which has an effect of shifting that curve up or down by up to several orders of magnitude.